Editorials
commonweal PATHS TO A NEW LIBERALISM WHAT IS LEFT on the Left? The question is taking many forms these days. What should Democrats do? Is liberalism dead? Is there a new liberalism? The current...
...It may even be divided on the issue of the draft...
...and if conservatism has something to crow about, it is mainly that many voters no longer distrust it so much as to prevent them from signaling their dissatisfaction with the administration in power...
...On the one hand, the "new liberalism" sounds a lot like 5 December 1980: 675 the old Republicanism, or even like the Carterism that the electorate has just rejected...
...The issue of race is an outstanding example (although the change is not so decisive that blacks and other minorities cannot be bitter about recent setbacks or alarmed at the resurgence of blatant racism in the form of strutting Klansmen...
...that ought to be a leading priority for a new liberalism...
...The Democrats have never really recovered from the wounds of 1968...
...they voted on the traditional liberal turf of The Economy...
...But liberalism has nothing to crow about either...
...Even if a healthy chunk of the Anderson vote were added to Reagan's total, the president-elect still did not match the combined Nixon and Wallace vote of '68 or the Nixon sweep of '72...
...outspend the Soviets and Warsaw Pact in military matters, and that, with China counted in among its adversaries, Moscow is at least outspent three to two...
...Most of this talk is decidedly disappointing...
...Between this and Reaganism there is only a matter of degree, plus perhaps a firmer attachment to the Bill of Rights...
...The latter, in fact, is well on its way to becoming the bugaboo of these liberals...
...With enemies like that, the advocates of human rights should be able to find friends...
...It should be willing to spend money on sensible military reforms...
...The picture is, of course, even more complicated...
...But beyond raising militancy—and funds—among the already converted, these efforts are unlikely to succeed, indeed may very well backfire...
...Cut social spending, streamline social regulation, build a stronger economy by giving business more tax advantages, boost America, and increase armaments...
...All this is background to the talk about a "new liberalism...
...Or to go further back, from the wounds (proud ones, though they may be) of the civil-rights revolution that, along with inevitable social change, broke up the Democratic Solid South...
...is facing massive economic adjustment—to a world of expensive energy, of nations equally advanced economically, of rising nations offering competition for jobs and capital, of multi-national corporations, and of unprecedented movements of production and financing...
...The bill for increased arms spending will be high, in taxes and inflation...
...Another version of a' 'new liberalism," cropping up after the election, seems to promise simply a new aggressiveness mirroring that of the New Right—and on many of the same issues: abortion, women's rights, public displays of religion, etc...
...Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union have embarked on advertising campaigns attacking right-tolifers and the Moral Majority...
...Yet with the Reagan economic policy still hatching, a new liberalism could also start organizing itself around two foreign-policy planks: First, human rights...
...It can be swung back again, {/the new liberalism has the courage, as well as the political shrewdness, to prick the balloon of today's scare talk, to point out, for instance, that the Soviets have been relatively steady, not suddenly expansionist, in their military spending, that NATO and the U.S...
...But the current bout of arms fever is subject to every criticism conservatives have directed toward liberal social programs: symbol instead of substance, "throwing money at problems," consideration of benefits without equal consideration of cost...
...As we argued here in the last issue, conservatives won big on November4, but conservatism won small...
...In this adjustment, some will be winners and some will be losers...
...But complaints of "waste" are equally strong, and dissatisfaction with liberal measures has found many adherents, not only among Republicans, but on both wings of the Democratic party, among radicals who thought these measures were turned against those they were meant to serve, and among neoconservatives who questioned their efficacy and their effect on the social fabric...
...Since the Second World War, there has only been one sweeping liberal victory in presidential elections—in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson profited from the reaction to Kennedy's assassination and the fear of Goldwater's "extremism in the defense of liberty...
...Commonweal: 676...
...A "new liberalism" ought to have opposed it...
...Citizens continue to express concern about the issues liberalism promoted—decent provisions for jobs, old age, health, education, a safe environment—and even declare a willingness to spend more for them...
...The U.S...
...The big winners were status-quo Republicans, Eisenhower and Nixon in 1972...
...As The Economist wrote, 1980 "was the election that Watergate postponed...
...In effect, liberalism's troubles have been a long time coming...
...By and large, Americans voted for a change...
...but in fact this testy mood does not exclude considerable suspicion of a foreign policy based on theories of containment and superpower rivalry alone or on the protection, of raw materials...
...The election was no big swing from liberalism—in fact, liberalism has been in trouble for a long time...
...Popular and elite opinion has swung from an advocacy of less military spending to an advocacy of more...
...To treat opposition to abortion, for example, as the possession of fanatic blue-noses is about on the same level of insult as treating concern for the security of Israel as an expression of atavistic tribalism...
...Only the left is prepared to discuss openly the fair distribution of those rewards and burdens...
...On the one hand, the public's attitudes have grown significantly more liberal in a number of respects during the last decades...
...The same is true about arms reduction...
...a counter-revolutionary monolith or cynical partner of dictatorships, are there for those willing to preach them...
...Our guess is that the political party which develops a persuasive incomes policy will take the marbles in 1984...
...David Rockefeller has just traveled to some of the brightest spots on the map of torture, assuring the local notables that, under Reagan, it will be business as usual...
...The current discussion is the child of the latest election, but that is one of the things that leads to confusion...
...It is true that the American public is tired of being "kicked around" by ungrateful Latins, Europeans, ayatollahs, etc...
...The long-run benefits, and the political attractiveness, of a policy that does not make the U.S...
...The other Democratic victories were squeakers—in 1948, 1960, and 1976—and the latter two times the winning candidates were only ambiguously liberal...
...In our view, the central question for an authentic, and politically successful, "new liberalism" should be, Who will pay...
...The new liberalism should not be quasi-pacifist...
...They misread, and may even magnify, the power of groups like the Moral Majority, and they are insensitive to the legitimate concerns that those groups have channeled into primitive politics...
Vol. 107 • December 1980 • No. 22
